Our 2020 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir was featured at JancisRobinson.com in their Wines of the Week feature:
“A juicy, earthy, sustainably grown Pinot from one of Oregon’s founding families – and at a good price.
When I tasted the 2020, I was immediately charmed by its balance of fruit and earthier notes, a quiet undertow that took me straight to the mouth-watering, mossy dark crumbles under an old log in a forest. My tasting note described it as ‘a juicy mash-up of ripe summer berries that makes me think of summer pudding, but it comes with wonderfully fragrant black-pepper fragrance and cardamom spice, a little mycorrhizal-mushroom under-earth earthiness. The sweetness of dark cherries swirls through the mid palate, picking up the furl of driftwood texture, and then slides into a silky finish.’ It’s a neat 13.5% alcohol, and paired beautifully with the lamb kleftiko we’d cooked to test out some Easter food-wine combos.” – Tamlin Currin, Sustainability Editor & Staff Writer
Thank you for reviewing our 2020 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir! Currin also writes at length about our sustainability practices here at Elk Cove:
“Although their wines are not certified organic, Elk Cove has a strong sustainability ethos. They plant clover cover crops rather than using nitrogen-based fertilisers and grass to prevent erosion, and run all their trucks and tractors on bio-diesel. Goats and longhorn cattle control invasive weeds and they only use sprays certified by OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) for pesticide control. Vines are dry farmed (irrigation for young vines up to three years old). They have the Salmon-Safe and Oak Accord certifications to protect waterways and native Oregon white-oak woodlands, and they pay living wages and provide healthcare benefits to all their vineyard workers. In the winery, waste water and lees are recycled back to the vineyards; solar panels provide 40% of their power; glass, cardboard, batteries and shipping materials from suppliers are recycled, and they use only recycled cardboard for their packaging. Fifty per cent of their bottles are in lightweight Eco-Glass. They are also known for their philanthropy to local non-profit organisations.”
View the original review at JancisRobinson.com
Jancis Robinson is founder-editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine, co-author with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine (nearly five million copies sold) and co-author of Wine Grapes, each of these books recognized as a standard reference worldwide. The 24-Hour Wine Expert (2017) is a slim paperback guide to the practical essentials of wine. In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to pass the rigorous Master of Wine exams and in 2003 she was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she advised from 2004 until 2022.
